building social value

Living in The Middle

The Suburbs: A modest proposal and call to action

Eric Stotts

I grew up in the Suburbs.

I left the Suburbs. I studied the Suburbs.

I live in the Suburbs. Happily. By Choice.

I want to engage the Suburbs, improve the Suburbs,

CHANGE the suburbs - and our perception of them.

I live with Pattie, my wife, my son Lincoln and my daughter Vaughn in the house my wife was born in. Nightingale Drive, in Rockingham - just up Flamingo off of the Bedford Highway. This house was built in 1964 and was one of the first in the area.

By now, 40 years out, things have matured. the trees are nice - and plentiful. It's still quiet. We have tons of lawn for kids to play. our backyard is comprised of four yards and uninterrupted by fences. We BBQ under the carport.

My neighbor and I share a toolshed. Multi-generational households are being established when the kids - now with families of their own - move back to their childhood home.

I like it here.

So why is my neighborhood and thousands more like it, so often ignored by architects and architecture schools? The very environment where a good number of students were born and raised is relegated to a bench seat when it comes to academic discourse, or - even worse - treated with derision or scorn. "Leave it to the developers," is the refrain.

I whole-heartedly disagree.

There is fantastic essay by Albert Pope, a professor at Rice University in Houston, where I received my education, entitled "The Primacy of Space." In it, Pope writes:

The contemporary city, the city that is, at this moment, under construction, is invisible. Despite the fact that it is lived in by millions of people, that it is endlessly reproduced, debated in learned societies, and suffered on a daily basis, the conceptual framework that would allow us to see it is conspicuously lacking. While the contemporary city remains everywhere and always seen, it is fully transparent to the urban conceptions under which we continue to operate.

In other words: old rules don't necessarily apply. The formal ideas which stem from urbanity are often rendered powerless or irrelevant when haphazardly overlaid on suburban spaces. We need new tools in the toolbox. Hell, we need a whole other toolbox.

I envision a suburban landscape which is transformed - and transformative. There is enormous opportunity in and much work to be done identifying, addressing and reversing the negative impacts of ill-considered urban development (i.e. sprawl) - and then proposing, designing and building solutions. We will need the best and brightest to assemble collaborative entities to recast, reshape and revitalize these suburbs - many of which are already showing signs of extreme disrepair.

In order to initiate the process, all preconceived notions must be jettisoned in favor of a fresh look. We can no longer afford to develop separate urban and suburban development plans and treat them as separate entities, or worse yet, arch-enemies. In the end they are absolutely co-dependent. They absolutely rely on each other. The suburbs need to be subjected to new sets of eyes. And brains. They need to be experienced, studied, documented and built-upon. Think Learning from Las Vegas.

I have some clear ideas about where I'm heading with all of this, and I look forward to confronting this challenge - I hope some of you do too.

I sign off with a photograph from American photographer Gregory Crewdson. I first was exposed to Crewdson's amazing large-scale photographs at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) about ten years ago. The suburbs and small towns of America are his stomping grounds, and his photographs resonated with me at the deepest level. there's something about the sublime quality of light and space in these photos which took me right back to those suburban summer evenings as a kid, with cicadas clicking, lightning bugs glowing, and adults laughing at picnic tables under aluminum patio awnings.

I like it here.